What a fun day on Friday! The kids had two wonderful Christmas programs! If you missed the program, or would like to catch part of it again, please look under the photos tab for a few snippets! We also had a little fun at a Christmas themed photo booth on Friday and those pictures are under the photos tab as well!

We will be doing some fun Christmas themed activities for this short week! In reading we will be reading some Christmas stories and doing comprehension activities with them. On Monday we will also present our unit 3 inquiry projects. We will be finishing up our reindeer job applications in writing and working on some descriptive writing. In math we will review relating multiplication and division, determining the unknown in a multiplication or division sentence, and problem solving.

On Monday morning we will be leaving the school between 8:30 and 8:45 to walk up to St. John's to perform our Christmas program for the residents there. We will then walk over to Mission Ridge and perform once more. This will probably take us about an hour and a half to two hours so we won't get back to the school until around 10:30 or 11.

I have a fun day planned for Tuesday! In the morning we are going to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the original one and it is rated G). We have been reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a read aloud this last month so then we are going to compare the book and the movie. The kids will have a chance to buy in to wear their pajamas on Tuesday and a chance to buy in to bring a stuffed animal to snuggle with for the movie as well. It should be a fun morning! Tuesday is a full day of school and the rest of the day will be filled with some math games and a Christmas song activity.

I want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and take the opportunity to thank you for sharing with me the most precious gifts of all, your children! I feel so blessed and lucky to get to spend my days with such a caring and fun group of kiddos! Every day they do something to make me smile and laugh. They truly are a bright light in my life and they just fill my heart with love! Merry Christmas from my family to yours!

I hope that everyone had a wonderful weekend! Mine was! We got some Christmas shopping done, had a joyful staff Christmas party, and I had the chance to go to Amelia's piano recital and she played beautifully (I even got to see a couple of my previous kiddos play, so fun)! I also look forward to Aubrey's recital tonight!

We are in for a fun, eventful week! In reading we are finishing up our inquiry projects. I am hoping to present by Wednesday. This unit the kids have been making Animoto presentations finding, pictures and writing captions that go along with their research about how geography shapes a community. I will post them to the blog as soon as we have finished! This week we will also be working on reading comprehension, predicting, questioning, and summarizing with a couple fun Christmas stories.

In writing this week we will share our procedural "how to" pieces. Then we will be working on a persuasive piece trying to convince Santa that we could be one of his reindeer!

In math we will still be focusing on problem solving for the majority of the week. We will also be practicing multiplication and division with our math games this week.

In science this week we are finally starting Project Lead the Way! I am so excited to get started. Our first unit is called Science of Flight. We will start this week by practicing logging into our online portion, we will begin with a story to get us thinking about balancing weight, and then we will participate in an activity that focusing on balancing weight.

Wow, what a great week we had! Thank you so much to everyone who came to Barnes and Noble night! It was a great success and I loved seeing so many people there supporting our school! Thank you also to everyone who came to listen to me read, that was very fun!

This week in reading we are on week 4 of unit 3. We will be revisiting both stories we read this unit, Living on the Land and Tops and Bottoms. We will also revisit all the skills we worked on this unit: monitoring comprehension, multiple meaning words, using context clues, recognizing homophones, inflected endings, and noun suffixes. In inquiry we will continue working on adding our pictures and captions to our Animoto presentations. We will present next week.

In writing this week we will continue working on our procedural "how to" papers. We will also be studying linking verbs, action verbs, and verb tenses.

In math this week we are working all week with problem solving. We have now introduced the all the strategies for multiplication and division, so this week we are working on applying those to solving word problems. We will begin the week with multiplication problem solving, work on solving multiple-step problems, and end the week with division problem solving.

In social studies we are learning about immigration and Ellis Island. It is a very interesting unit and it gets many of the kids thinking about where their ancestors came from. Part of homework this week will be a family tree. I know that some of you may be able to take that quite far back and others may not, that's ok, just go as far as you can. It will be really interesting for the kids to see if any of their ancestors came to America through Ellis Island, and if so from where!

This school year will mark my seventh year of teaching and I must say I am so blessed to be a part of such a great community at Arrowhead school. I am excited to begin a new year with a wonderful group of kids!! I grew up in Helena and attended college in Bozeman, MT at MSU. Go Bobcats! While there I obtained a degree in Elementary Education and a minor in Reading. In 2016 I received a masters degree in Education Leadership. Six years ago I married my high school sweetheart, Tymon. We also have a five year old adorable mini australian shepherd puppy, Molly. This year we are also welcoming our first child in February and we are so excited to be parents! When I am not teaching I love to be outside enjoying hiking trails or taking in a sporting event.